“Same land, different life”: Under this slogan, Huaming, a model town in the suburban Dongli District of the municipality of Tianjin, China’s fifth-largest city, was presented at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai as a successful example of China’s rural urbanization. The slogan was meant to express that the peasants who had to give up their land in the process of urbanization and relocate to Huaming were leading better lives than before. This is in line with the official portrayal of government-engineered urbanization projects all across the country. However, Western journalism and most of academia are painting quite the opposite picture, commonly describing a deterioration of people’s lives due to numerous problems.
As can be seen from the case of Huaming, there are contradictory narratives surrounding the consequences that China’s state-led urbanization is supposed to have for landless peasants. A narrative essentially is a series of nonrandomly connected events that has been constructed to provide meaning—whether it appears in propaganda, the media, academic discourse, or personal life stories and everyday accounts. Thus, narratives play an important role for both world-making and self-making.
The goal of this article is to critically examine competing narratives surrounding China’s state-led urbanization and put them in perspective by adopting a “view from below,” i.e., by including landless peasants’ own stories in the equation. These findings not only allow us to more thoroughly discuss China’s urbanization policy and its impact on the people, but also prompt us to more consciously reflect on our potential preconceptions.
In this article, I first provide an overview of the background and general discourses surrounding China’s state-led rural urbanization. Then, Huaming is introduced as a case study that illustrates the construction of divergent narratives. Finally, I critically question these narratives by drawing on data from seven months of ethnographic fieldwork among Huaming’s landless peasants.
